James Cameron reacts to Roland Emmerich calling him ‘overbearing’

No point in accusing James Cameron of a possessing a quality he’s proud of. No point in starting beef with Cameron at all.

The famously feisty and extremely profitable writer-director has responded to accusations slung at him by Independence Day writer-director Roland Emmerich, with whom Cameron briefly worked on mounting a long-gestating remake of the 1966 adventure film Fantastic Voyage. In response to Emmerich calling him “very overbearing,” Cameron told The Hollywood Reporter, “Yes, I’m overbearing. Damn right.”

The back and forth began at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, during Collider’s Directors on Directing panel featuring Emmerich, Training Day director Antoine Fuqua, and moderator Fast X director Louis Leterrier, who asked about the status of Fantastic Voyage. Emmerich replied, “James Cameron is very overbearing, and so I, at one point, just gave up.”

Cameron has been pursuing a Fantastic Voyage remake as far back as the late 1990s, with directors like Guillermo Del Toro, Paul Greengrass, and Shawn Levy all attached at various points in time.

Emmerich made his statement matter-of-factly, “Because it’s like, ‘Is it your movie or my movie?’” Both Cameron and Emmerich are known for exerting a fairly high-degree of control over their sets. And that’s exactly what turned Emmerich off from the experience of working with Cameron: “I have to say, I do my stuff, and when I can’t do my stuff, I’m totally not interested. As simple as that. So when somebody else wants to say something to me and is more powerful than me, I drop out.”

Reps for Cameron and Emmerich did not immediately respond to EW’s request for comment.

Given Cameron’s years spent ushering the film toward production, one can understand why he might be protective. It’s also easy to see why a filmmaker like Emmerich, who has carved out a unique niche of helming $100-million-plus blockbusters without major studio backing, might be less tolerant than others of interference and micromanaging.

“When it’s a project where I’ve contributed to the writing, I might actually have an opinion on it,” Cameron told THR, admitting, “I actually don’t even remember talking to Roland Emmerich about Fantastic. I remember the other directors that we worked with for months on end trying to develop that project…. If I talked to Roland, it was for two minutes. I have a pretty good memory and I don’t remember that at all.”

The original Fantastic Voyage followed a submarine crew who are miniaturized in order to cruise through the capillaries of one of their shipmates and fix his damaged brain from the inside out. It was directed by fêted action-helmer Richard Fleischer (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Conan the Destroyer) and starred Raquel Welch, Donald Pleasance, and Stephen Boyd.

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When asked if the remake was still a go, Cameron quipped, “Move on, that’s a non-story.” He does have other, more pressing matters to attend to. Namely the third Avatar film, which just received an official title at this year’s D23 fan event: Avatar: Fire and Ash. “The new film is not what you expect,” he told the crowd, “but it’s definitely what you want.”

Emmerich is hard at work on his own sprawling epic, Space Nation, a MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) that will kick off a sci-fi multimedia universe to include spinoff games, animated shorts, and a TV series.

You hate to see two kings duke it out in the public square, but if, somehow, the rumble helps get the Fantastic Voyage remake going, we’ll all owe Emmerich a thank you.